Crafting for gift giving

When giving gifts I like to give a combination of store bought and hand made. I recently put together a gift bag for a friend who had a birthday the other day.
Two of the gifts I made for her were a raggy keychain

And this framed embroidery piece.

 This was done on my embroidery machine. After letting the machine do it's thing I was trying to decide how I wanted to finish this off. I thought about using it for a candle mat or a jar wrap but decided just to frame it instead.

Tracking progress

Back at the beginning of May I noticed a birds nest in the small evergreen tree we have next to our front door.

I was a bit concerned though because every time we went in or out that door the mother bird would take off out of the tree. I was hoping that she wouldn't give up in frustration and abandon the nest. I was watching it every day to see how things were going.

I was thrilled the day I came home and discovered the eggs had hatched and there were three little newborns in the nest.

They just keep getting fuzzier every day.

They've come a long way since this last picture but that's still on my camera. I'll continue to watch the nest daily and will post more of my little guests.

When the toilet paper is gone

Don't throw out that empty roll from your toilet paper use it to wrap a little gift with.

Marie from Spun by Me had pinned some paper roll pillow boxes and I thought they were a great idea. Since I just happened to have a couple of empty rolls I thought I would make some of my own. You can find the original ones on Art is Medicine

I actually made three of these but don't have a picture of the first one. That one I did make with a toilet tissue roll. The second two were made from a paper towel roll that was cut in half.

Those little yo-yo flowers have been decorating a lot of my projects lately. The postage marks are a stamp set I purchased quite a while ago and finally found a good use for them

This one was a happy accident. I was pulling out different things to glue on and I used the small fabric scrap, tea dyed cheese cloth and a bit of lace. Then I was digging through my stash and found those beads, a bit of blue wire and some hemp cord. I twisted a few strands of the cord to make it look like a rope and then glued all the little bits on. I was quite pleased with the way this one turned out.

These won't hold anything big but are perfect for a small gift like a pair of earrings or a charm.

Page 6

I have another art journal page. Let me warn you that this one and the next one are not all that impressive. Good or bad they are suitable for blog material.

Since I'm not impressed with these I'm only going to show you one today. I'll save bad art part two for another post.